Party affiliation is still the number one factor influencing
voter decision, but after that it may come down to a single word,
or at least a one-word description of the candidates. You can see
what I mean by applying the word association technique to a few
former chief executives. Think of Nixon, you think of Watergate.
Think of Carter you think malaise. Think of Clinton you think
Monica. Or Hillary. Or bimbo eruptions, in general. Think of Ford
and you probably dose off. Only Ronald Reagan seems to have been
too big to pin down to a single word. He does, after all, get
credit for winning the Cold War, which dwarf the other things he is
remembered for: Reaganomics, the Reagan Revolution,
Iran-Contra.
Sen. John McCain would probably prefer his word be “maverick,”
or “hero.” Sorry, but the word most associated with the Arizona
senator, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for
the People & the Press, is “old.” Maverick and hero, in fact,
come rather far down the list, after the unflattering “Bushlike”
and the misnomer “conservative.”
Sen. Barack Obama’s description is even less attractive:
“inexperienced.” At least we may assume the connotations of
inexperienced are less flattering than those associated with old.
After all, isn’t old age linked to wisdom, virtue, and experience?
“Old foxes want no tutors,” said historian Thomas Fuller. Of course
this was the same Fuller who said, “Old sacks want much patching,”
and “old vessels must leak.” So which is it? Is old age
semantically a positive or a negative?
We like to think past generations had devout respect for their
elders, and only with the Boomers did old become synonymous with
fusty and outmoded. But that’s not the case, notes David Hackett
Fischer in Growing Old in America. True, the Puritans did
venerate the elderly, whom they thought might achieve true moral
greatness through the “leaven of time.” However, their New England
heirs, the Transcendentalists, took the opposite view. “Nature
abhors the old,” wrote Emerson, and Thoreau, as usual, went
further: “I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have
yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice
from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot
teach me anything.” To Thoreau, the old were experienced only in
the ways of failure. His “ethical anarchism” had an obvious appeal
to 1960s radicals, intellectuals, and rock stars.
Ronald Reagan may have been (to date) the oldest man elected to
the White House, but he was somehow able to convince the nation he
was ushering in “Morning in America,” that he was a revolutionary
figure of change capable of restoring pride in the American body
politic. McCain, meanwhile, has been dubbed “Bush Redux.”
Further, old may equally signify out-of-touch, a notion McCain
reinforced when he admitted he was an Internet illiterate, before a
spokesman rushed to his aid with one of the unintentionally
funniest statements of the campaign —“John McCain is aware of the
Internet” — which, gaffe-wise, was as big a flop as George H.W.
Bush’s amazement at a supermarket scanner, a fiction dismissed by
the Urban Legends website, though one that nonetheless persists to
this day.
TODAY AMERICANS 50 years of age and older make up 24 percent of the
population. Not surprisingly McCain is doing well among the
elderly, who are not so much interested in a maverick, as a steady
hand on the tiller. “It’s McCain’s lead among voters over the age
of 65 that is keeping him within shouting distance of Obama,” says
pollster John Zogby. Meanwhile Obama has been deified by the young.
The fact that he is leading among independent voters (44 percent to
39 percent), most of whom tend to be young, suggests they, like
Thoreau, prefer “inexperience” over “old.” (Interestingly McCain
was not always anathema to young hip voters. During the 2000
presidential campaign, David Foster Wallace noted McCain’s appeal
among the young which he attributed to the fact that they were
“starved” for “just some minimal level of genuineness in the men
who want to ‘lead’ and ‘inspire’ them.” But McCain was eight years
younger then, and David Foster Wallace was still alive.)
His age aside, it is hard for the mass of voters to personally
dislike McCain. In fact, he seems so gosh-darn likable that
Democrats have to try to hoodwink voters into thinking McCain is
not McCain, but the reincarnation of George W. Bush, and the
popularity of the word “Bushlike” suggests the strategy is working.
Were it not for the current financial crisis on Wall Street, for
which voters tend to blame Republicans, McCain would be dead-even
with Obama among independents, and it is independents that will
decide this election. For the Obama campaign, the financial crisis
was the luckiest thing that could have happened.
A Welsh proverb states that, “One has to be neither strong nor
bold to win a victory over the old.” I would add, just lucky.
